Literature and Emotion (PAMLA special session)
Literary texts affect us emotionally. They can negotiate the ambiguities and complexities of emotions in a highly nuanced way and help readers to develop their "emotional literacy," that is the ability to read, understand and cope with one’s own emotions and those of others. Through modulations of narrative voice and focalization, literature can, for example, generate empathy or insight by allowing readers to reflect upon the emotional impasses, contradictions and precarities faced by marginalized or "othered" individuals or groups (e.g. recent media representations challenging the trope of the presumed "lack of empathy" of individuals on the Autism spectrum) and the cultural variability, historicity and social constructedness of emotions (e.g.